“There is no one way to hit,” Yelich said in October 2018. Nor is there one way to develop players.

In 2015, Bill James said, “My view on the world is we have an ocean of ignorance and a small island of knowledge.” He wasn’t speaking specifically about baseball, but the observation applies, even to one of the most obsessively chronicled and comprehensively quantified human hobbies.

“When I came there and saw our player-development goals, I was like, oh my word. This is stuff you can’t work on,” Fast says. “It was stuff like, ‘Improve your command.’ How’s a pitcher supposed to go into the off-season and improve his command? He needs a drill. He needs to know how to measure if he’s getting better.”

I’ll never forget that. It proved to me and made me see how important player development was, how important repetition was, how important individual instruction was.”

Ottavino countered that the Edgertronic would make him think less, narrowing his focus. “I’m gonna think either way,” Ottavino told the coaches, “but this makes me know what to think about.”

“It turns out the quickest way to acquire a new skill is to force yourself to do that skill with a constantly changing environment, implement, or activity,” Bauer says. “If you can vary one of those [elements] every single time, with the same goal, then your body acquires that skill a lot more quickly.”

“This is a fairly typical flight session,” Bauer says. “You got to see a good representation of what it is. Generally, you do more fixing than actual flying.”

Cultural critic Maria Popova writes that with a fixed mindset, “avoiding failure at all costs becomes a way of maintaining the sense of being smart or skilled,” whereas a growth mindset regards failure not as evidence of stupidity or lack of ability but as a “heartening springboard for growth and for stretching our existing abilities.”

The combination of “the intellectual component of critical thinking and problem solving, alongside the physical preparation and the competition, is one of those things that’s really unique to sports,” he says.